January, 2010

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Five Simple (and Fun) Ways to Promote Nonprofits on FourSquare

Nonprofit Tech for Good

FourSquare is definitely starting to catch on with enterprising techie folks that love to be early adopters. That’s a good a sign. Most check-ins revolve around restaurants and cafes, but below are five simple ways you (and the nonprofit techies) can also use FourSquare to promote the nonprofits and causes your care about: 1) Add Nonprofit Venues.

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Making the Case for Advancement Services

Robert Weiner

I got a call last week from the Advancement Services manager at a small college asking for help. She's trying to make the case for investing in Advancement Services at a college that seems to only want to invest in fundraisers. She had already found my post on the Ingredients of a High Performing Advancement Services Shop , my discussion summary, Top Issues Affecting Advancement Services (which led to an article in the October 2007 issue of CASE Currents called "Going Fourth: What every fund

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Beth’s Surprise Party: A Case Study in Crowdsourced Action

Amy Sample Ward

Yesterday was a very exciting day: we threw a surprise party for Beth Kanter online! It was a bit of fun mixed with experiment, and I think it was really successful. Here are some reflections about how we used crowdsourcing techniques for a very fast-moving campaign and lessons learned that may apply to your work. Lesson #1: Design an action and invitation that’s doable and interesting – while focused on your goal.

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Bookshare in Chennai

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

A guest Beneblog by Viji Dilip International Bookshare Program Manager Every morning braving the heavy Chennai traffic Maria wheels into Worth Trust to start her work as a proof reader. Maria was raised by the sisters of the local Chennai Church, given a basic education and was sent off to Worth Trust to learn life skills. Two years later, Maria who was affected by polio at the age of one and has to use a wheel chair and calipers, is now soon to be married on Jan 18th, 2010.

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The Retention Ripple Effect: Nonprofit Staff and Donor Dynamics

Speaker: Andrew Olsen, CFRE - EVP, Fundraising Solutions at DickersonBakker | Kat Landa, CFRE, CSD - SVP, Talent Solutions at DickersonBakker

Across the nonprofit sector, organizations invest heavily in donor retention efforts, yet the struggle of cultivating lasting relationships remains. While attracting new donors is crucial, the lack of repeat donors poses significant financial risks. Through a comprehensive analysis of industry data, experts argue that there is a direct correlation between donor burnout, donor retention, and the talent retention crisis.

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Nonprofits: Have we had enough of "vote for me" fundraising yet?

Judi Sohn

This weekend, the winners were announced in the Chase Community Challenge. On paper, it seemed simple enough. Chase gives $5 million to nonprofits based solely on the votes of regular folk on Facebook. "Their money, our votes." In reality, the challenge illustrated exactly why these "vote for me" contests in the nonprofit world have got to go away.

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Beth Kanter’s Birthday

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

You don’t hear me talking much about social media. One of the reasons is that there are a number of really good bloggers out there who know the field far better than I’ll ever be able to. I would argue that Beth Kanter is the best social media blogger there is in the nonprofit space. Her careful writing about the strengths and weaknesses of social media, the in-depth knowledge of strategy and approach, her on-the-cutting-edge understanding of trends and issues and how they relate to

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More Trending

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New Presentation on Social Media and Fundraising

NCE Social Media

I had the privilege to give a presentation on Social Media and Fundraising to the Western PA chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals today. Here is my presentation. I hope you enjoy it. Tags: Education and Training AFP fundraise PPT presentation.

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Return on Engagement for your Community

Amy Sample Ward

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and I’ve been watching the time zones wake up in the US and start Twittering about the various service projects and community building activities everyone is participating in. It’s been heart warming and also frustrating – I wish I could be so many places at once! I can only be in one place, though – but I can start a conversation that goes many places.

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The Davos Blur

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The Davos scene is nonstop: it starts with breakfast meetings at 8 am and ends typically after midnight. You rush from session to session, often jumping a shuttle from one hotel to another or back to the Congress Center. In between the meetings, there’s the powerful force of serendipity. In the hallways, you’re as likely to run into the head of an international NGO, as CEO of a Fortune 100 company, as a renowned professor as the foreign minister of a major country.

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Awesome file viewer in Box.net

Judi Sohn

via blog.box.net. Finally! Box.net has always had the ability to preview files, but it was through their Open Box system so 1. it sent the file to a 3rd party and 2. it was too slow. This new file viewer works right in Box.net and is quite fast. I can't count how many times I downloaded files from Box.net just to see what it was, only to have to dump them from my Downloads folder later.

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How to Design a Seamless & Personalized Digital Donor Journey

Speaker: Tim Sarrantonio

The average nonprofit uses five or more different software platforms to create their donor’s journey, making the experience clunky and disjointed. If you want to design a magical online giving experience for donors, making their journey as seamless as possible is key. In this webinar with expert Tim Sarrantonio, you’ll learn the fundamental steps to create an immersive and personalized online giving experience for your donors.

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The continuing saga of the new T400S

Robert Weiner

The continuing story of my new Thinkpad T400S laptop. I finally feel like it's starting to come together, particularly the upgrade to Windows 7. Here's the story so far. Maybe my experience will help someone else. After transferring my data and software using Laplink (and after figuring out that I had to decrypt my files first) I found that everything was owned by some mystery account.

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Three iPhone Apps that Every Nonprofit Needs to Know About

Nonprofit Tech for Good

The use of iPhone Apps that benefit the nonprofit sector is going to explode in 2010. Hundreds of iPhone Apps created by nonprofits and nonprofit service providers are quietly preparing for an early 2010 launch. That said, there are three iPhone Apps currently live and available for download that give us a good picture of how iPhone Apps can be utilized by nonprofits, activists, and donors: 1) Geolocation Activism :: CauseWorld.

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Using Social Media to Improve Your Nonprofit's Efforts

NetWits

This is a guest post by Chris Brogan. He does incredible things with businesses in the new media space. Make sure to visit chrisbrogan.com. Many thanks to Chris for stopping by [link] and sharing his insight with our readers. Over the past few years, I've experimented a lot with nonprofits. I've worked to promote causes, to raise money, to drive awareness further down the funnel into the "action" category.

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The other side of the figures: Causes reaches $20 Million in Donations

Amy Sample Ward

Earlier this week, an announcement on the Causes Application blog broke the news that over $20 Million has been donated since May 2007 via donors using the social networking application. There’s been quite a lot of talk in the last year about the opportunities for fundraising online, generally, as well as the best practices for organizations leveraging social media for campaigns (as well as the idea to use free tools to raise money in hard economic times).

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Nonprofits Are Leveraging the Cloud, but Does It Have to Be So Complex?

Effectively managing cloud technology is getting more complex. From cybersecurity concerns, vendor lock-in, cost increases, or lack of transparency on costs, it can quickly get out of control. Knowing what you can control and finding a platform that’s built with nonprofits in mind is key.

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Human Rights Trainings in Nigeria

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

A Guest Beneblog by Vijaya Tripathi As outreach coordinator for Martus , Benetech’s secure software application, I travel to many countries where human rights defenders need tools to gather, organize and back up information about human rights violations. Over the past few years, I have seen human rights groups become much more sophisticated about how they use technology to document human rights abuses.

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AT&T Nation Unlimited is rip-off for larger family plans

Judi Sohn

As rumored, AT&T unveiled new unlimited plans last week that went into effect yesterday. $69/month for unlimited voice. If you have a smartphone, tack on another $30/month for unlimited data. Strangely, this still doesn't include SMS so you'll need another $20/month for that. Still, compared to the price of a metered minutes plan, it's not a bad deal.

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Setting up my new Thinkpad T400S

Robert Weiner

I recently received my new Lenovo Thinkpad T400S -- thinner, faster, and lighter than my current T400. But getting it set up has been a bear. A few of the lowlights, after 6 days of work: 1) I used Laplink to transfer my data, apps, and settings. I've been using Laplink products for at least 15 years with good results. This time, not so good. The big problem turned out to be that I had encrypted my data on my current computer.

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HOW TO: Add Your Nonprofit to FourSquare

Nonprofit Tech for Good

FourSquare has received quite a bit of buzz over the last few months. Some have even declared it to be the “ Twitter of 2010 “ I am not so sure about that, but it is fun. It is Different. Addictive. And as of last week, FourSquare has gone global. Thus, now all nonprofits worldwide have a good reason to get FourSquare on their radar screen.

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Nonprofit Technology Kick Start: Free World Class Board Meeting Software

Looking for cost reductions for your nonprofit? Why not consider modernizing with a digital board management system that's designed to work with remote meetings, with immediate cost reductions if you still distribute paper packets to members? Get going in less than an hour on a fully hosted cloud solution built on the latest technology that runs on any device - from desktops to tablets and smartphones - without any installation.

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What we can learn from the Haitian Earthquake

NCE Social Media

There are several things we can learn from the Haitian Earthquake that are socialmedia-related. With the recent Haitian earthquake, texting donations has garnered new media focus. While popular in Europe for some time, texting donations has finally broken through as a promising fundraising tool here. The Red Cross has collected more than $22 million in donations via text messages in one week.

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Nonprofit Marketing Report: Organizations Failing to Connect

Amy Sample Ward

Nancy Schwartz, president of Nancy Schwartz & Company and blogger at Getting Attention , has just finished analyzing data from a nonprofit marketing survey of more than 900 nonprofit leaders, revealing that they are doing a poor job connecting with their audience and community. Nancy explains: “Nonprofit marketers say their key messages are failing to connect with the people who need to hear them and that is a serious problem.

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Social Enterprise Alliance Summit

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

As I head off to the WEF Summit in Davos, I'm also excited about the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit coming up in San Francisco at the end of April. The membership of the Alliance are "my people," folks who speak both social and business fluently. The response to the early bird registration was incredible. We had to extend the early bird a week (actually, from last Friday to today) for member organizations to make sure everybody who wanted to register early got their double-discount (being a m

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Email Communication in 2010

NetWits

Email is still a powerful way to communicate with your constituents. A report by technology market research firm The Radicati Group estimates that there are 1.4 billion email users in 2009, expected to rise to 1.9 billion by 2013. The same source suggests that some 247 billion emails are sent each day in 2009.

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Donor Engagement Guide: 8 Key Steps to Better Retain and Engage Donors

Are your donors your biggest fans, or are you lacking donor loyalty? The truth is, your donors have expectations of what their relationship with your organization should look like. This ebook will help you learn how to live up to those expectations!

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Chase Giving Contest: Winners Announced Amidst Yet More Controversy

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Less than two hours ago, Chase Community Giving made the much anticipated announcement of the lucky winner of $1 million dollars and five finalists each receiving $100,000 on its contest Fan Page. This contest was the culmination of a two-part "vote for me" cause marketing strategy that started in November and has been rife with controversy. In some ways, it comes as no surprise that the race to the finish line ended with more allegations of dubious behavior by contest participants and those wa

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10 Nonprofit Mobile Websites

Nonprofit Tech for Good

As more and more nonprofits launch group texting and text-to-give campaigns in the coming months, we’re also going to see more and more nonprofits launch mobile websites – or at the very least breaking news, donate now and subscribe web pages that can be easily read on mobile devices. I’ll be covering that in more detail next week, but in the meantime take a quick browse through the sites below.

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Video Fridays #27 When Social Media Became News

NCE Social Media

James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news — and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy. How have you used social media for your news source? The Arc of Northern Virginia is live tweeting their state’s budget hearings on funding for programs supporting people with intellectual disabilities.

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January #4Change Chat Topic: Campaigning

Amy Sample Ward

The January #4Change Twitter Chat will focus on the use of Twitter and other social media tools in campaigning. About the Topic. Campaigning can mean many different things and we want to keep the definition of the topic fairly open for this chat, in order to keep insights, resources and conversation in the Q/A format as open to valuable input as possible.

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Nonprofit Technology Adoption: Why It Matters and How to Be Successful

Organizations like yours are increasingly realizing that technology adoption is only as good as the technology you choose. Statistics from a 2014 NTEN study show that seriously investing resources in training for your staff corresponds to higher adoption and ultimately technology effectiveness. In this report, we’ll give you a high-level overview of how to get your organization in shape for technology adoption and best practices for facilitating this critical process.

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Amazon eBook pricing war: Thanks for being evil, Apple

Judi Sohn

Eric has a Kindle and loves it. One of the things we both love most about his Kindle is that he can get most books for $9.99. Me, I prefer audio books. I can read while I'm knitting and doing things around the house. Even though Apple has an easy way to get audio books in iTunes I don't do that. Instead, I get my books from Audible where I can get a $25 audio book for a credit that only cost me around $15 a month.

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Getting Started with Twitter

NetWits

Twitter can be hard to understand when you first begin using the service. It was for me. Once you figure it out and the initial excitement wears off you end up asking you self “what am I getting out of telling people what I had for lunch”? It’s a common problem (or misunderstanding). I stopped using the service about a month or so after I signed up for an account because I figured it was a waste of time.

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Three Fabulous Conversations

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The WEF is all about having a critical mass of incredible people. This enables great conversations: the serendipity effect is huge. I just wanted to highlight three conversations I had today, each of which shows why this is such a great opportunity for Benetech to attend. Conversation One Just as I finished my breakfast, I looked across the way and saw Larry Brilliant, the new head of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund.

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Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 Simplified for Nonprofits

Nonprofit Tech for Good

While there are a good number of tech-savvy hipsters out there that understand terms like “ Static Web ”, “ Dynamic Content ”, “ User-Generated ”, “ Cloud Computing ”, and “ Semantic Web ”, the majority of nonprofits don’t talk or understand such tech speak. So, to simply for the nonprofit masses, I present and frame very simple definitions and interpretations of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 as follows: Web 1.0 = Websites, e-mail newsletters and “Donate Now” buttons.

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Achieving Organizational Transformation: Pathways to Success

Association executives—and hopefully their boards—know that they are facing perilous times. Driven by the pace of cultural and technological change, they are experiencing major disruptions in the traditional business models that used to guide organizational growth strategies.orgSource offers a straightforward approach to navigating these changes and readying your organization for growth.